If you're only going to pick Pop!_OS or Manjaro, I'd suggest you go with Pop!_OS. The Manjaro team has been very weird, and made some poor decisions in recent years. I've had a very good experience messing around with Pop on an Nvidia GPU.
Instead of Manjaro, if the goal is to use an Arch Linux based distros, EndeavourOS is a good option. It us popular, more user friendly then arch, sticks pretty close to Arch main, the community seems friendly, and offers ways to customize your software install on first-boot
Any time I see someone mention Manjaro here, I see someone mention EndeavourOS; so maybe check that one out too?
I gave it an actual try and it's fine for intermediate users, but leaves much to desire out of the box for a regular person. No printer support out of the box... It's disabled by default, gotta install cups and enable it manually through systemctl if you skip that in the installer. And of course, most people would. Bluetooth is also turned off by default (Systemctl again) Samba 's turned off by default (Systemctl and package installation again, as well as some extra steps in the terminal) and it of course didn't come with a base Samba config file, which is required.
Manjaro's got a reputation and people love to hate it... But it doesn't have those issues and aside from the cases where you would absolutely need it on the most user-friendly distros, you don't need to ever touch the terminal on it. Pamac works really well, shows up as "Install and update programs" in the launch menus, supports native packages, AUR, Flatpak and Snap... and looks good to people who don't get angry at the sight of a CSD window. I use the AUR fairly frequently and have encountered essentially zero cases where a package wouldn't build on my system because of some Manjaro-specific issue in the past five years.
Edit: And for the record, I would recommend PopOS for anyone looking to use a stable Linux computer with up to date drivers and no nonsense. Arch based distros are good for tinkerers and I'd only recommend them to people who like fixing things and want full control.
If gaming is a priority, I would say skip both and go with Bazzite or Nobara. Otherwise Pop!_OS is still a good OS for everyday usage including gaming. It just might not have the latest drivers all the time.
Go with Bazzite instead.
The Nvidia drivers come pre-bundled with your install and are baked into the image itself.
The good thing is, they won't break, and if they should, you can just roll back to yesterday's image by just rebooting. It's extremely reliable and lets you just dive into your optimal gaming experience straight away.
Don't use Manjaro. The dev team is very sketchy and it's a very unreliable distro. If you really want Arch, for whatever reason, use EndeavourOS. I personally don't like the rolling release model and find Fedora (Bazzite) just right. If I need something from the AUR, then I use Distrobox.
PopOS is too old for me, and isn't evolving at all right now. I would skip it until Cosmic is ready.
I went with the preconfigured pop after being too annoyed at Ubuntu having to update all of the time, and it never felt like the drivers were 100% installed with ubuntu. I never looked back after swapping to Pop. It just works, all of the time. It's like a completely different linux experience to me. Add in the pop store where flatpak and stuff is just enabled by default (and snap is still there, but flatpak is definitely the preferred).. and man it's hard to look back.
Pop has been Rock solid for me and steam gaming. Trivial to set up and the store is wonderful too. Nice that it works great for non gaming tasks as well.
all the frustrations of linux are out the window for me with Pop. Sure I can go to the terminal and fuck with window managers and edit conf files for hours - but at this point in my life I really just want it to work - and man has Pop just done that. Ubuntu even was still a ton of futzing around (like flatpak, why are they so anti flatpak?!). Pop everything just works!
Having tried both popOS and manjaro I'd urge you to skip my trail and error and check out Nobara from the get go. Always found little naggling issues until I found Nobara
Neither. If you absolutely need a newbie installer try EndeavourOS or read the Arch wiki and install Arch. You'll have the most and arguably the best support that way.
Gaming on the GNU/Linux operating system.
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